In today's emerging technological and information world, companies are interacting with their customers, potential customers and other contacts through a wide variety of different communication channels. Such communication channels include face-to-face, telephone, fax, email, voicemails, wireless communication, Internet information inquiries via call me now and call me later, Internet collaborative sessions, paging and short messaging services. With all these communication channels, companies are faced with managing each customer interaction while meeting service levels and maximizing customer satisfaction. In addition, companies are faced with optimally staffing and training their workforce to deal with customers through these communication channels whether through their customer support center(s), telebusiness organizations, or their sales, marketing, and service professionals.
Currently, many companies have dedicated email inboxes, fax inboxes, and voicemail boxes defined for specific business areas as well as automated call distributors. Employees called agents are assigned to poll and manage the support requests from customers for each communication channel. Combined with the traditional call queues for inbound telephone calls, each agent is tasked with managing his or her work using all these communication channels while not having any visibility to the queue status and priorities of each customer support request and/or communication channel.
Most communication software is designed to work with a single communication device or type of communication channel. If a company wishes to implement a customer support center where agents can communicate using multiple communication channels of different media types, typically the company must purchase different software products to handle each media type because of the different communication protocols involved. For example, normally an email server is sold separately from software that can receive data via wireless access protocol.
Further, several third party vendors supply a range of different software products to perform similar functions. A centralized communication server capable of servicing multiple communication channels of different media types for several different customers can be provided, as set forth, for example, in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/823,835 (attorney docket M-11529 US, client reference SIEB063/US), entitled “Multi-Channel Media Independent Server.” Such a communication server can recognize a core group of commands and events from the customers' channel drivers, however, some customers may wish to add new commands or take advantage of extended command functions in their existing drivers.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide a system that allows customers to increase and extend the functionality of existing drivers.